All That Gore Gets in the Way of Gameplay

Share

All That Gore Gets in the Way of Gameplay

Barely 15 minutes into the new Wolverine videogame, I am ankle-deep in carnage. I have filleted soldiers straight up the center, like fish; I have spun in a pirouette of death, decapitating anyone and everyone an arms'-breadth away. And I've grabbed enemies by the neck, hoisting them aloft and stabbing them repeatedly – crick, crick, crick – right through their rib cages. Eeeyikes.

Does grisly violence like this make action games more fun? For years, I assumed the free market had answered that question with a resounding "yes." If shoot-'em-up games were insanely gory, it was, I figured, because developers were simply giving their hardcore young-dude audience what it wanted. Violence sells because violence works: It's crucial to creating a sense of dastardly fun. Right?

Maybe not. In fact, some recent and fascinating scientific work suggests precisely the opposite: In a paper in January's Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, a group of researchers found that violence might be the least compelling part of our favorite videogames. In fact, sometimes it gets in the way of the fun.

This story begins last year, when a group of researchers – led by Andrew Przybylski, a doctoral candidate in psychology and clinical social science at the University of Rochester in New York – designed six studies to measure how important in-game violence was in creating a sense of enjoyment. Does violence motivate gamers, they wondered? Does it increase their sense of immersion? Does it improve their satisfaction and sense of mastery?

To find out, they conducted several experiments and surveys. In one experiment, they had people play two versions of Half-Life 2 – one "low violence," the other "high violence." In the high-violence version, players duked it out with their opponents, using firearms and causing mass death; in the low-violence once, Half-Life 2 became more like a game of tag, so that when a player "shot" her opponents they just floated "into the air serenely before they appeared to evaporate," as the researchers describe it. The scientists also conducted surveys, asking more than 1,000 players to identify what elements of their favorite games gave them the most enjoyment.

The results? The amount of violence in a game did not predict how much gamers enjoyed it. When researchers asker players to pick their favorite titles, the highly violent games did not enjoy better word-of-mouth than less-violent ones, nor were they more likely to inspire players to buy a sequel. In fact, for some players rated violent content as "weakly negatively" related to enjoyment: The more gory the game, the less they liked it. (The only exception was a small minority of players who scored high on scales of aggression.)

"Violent videogame content adds little or no unique predictive variance to player enjoyment," as Przybylski and his colleagues concluded in their paper.

For this study to really hold water, its results will have to be confirmed by other scientists' research. But assuming the results are valid, we're left with two interesting questions.

Because violence doesn't contribute much to how well a game plays. What gamers most demand from a game, the researchers found, is awesome play mechanics. Their subjects liked it when a game gave them a sense of "autonomy" and "competence" – such as when the game had well-crafted controls, an environment that wasn't frustrating and nicely balanced combat and puzzles.

This squares with what many gamers have told me over the years: That the longer you play a "twitch" action game, the less you notice the cultural content – the gushing blood, the shrieks of agony. You're too busy focusing on the gameplay.

I noticed this with Wolverine. For the first hour, I found the deranged bloodshed both shocking and exciting; it made me feel like I "was" Logan, the grunting, killing-machine character from Marvel Comics' X-Men universe. But as I became more expert, the cultural shell of the game boiled away.

In a sort of staring-into-the-cascading-numbers-of-the-Matrix way, I found myself looking past the visible aspects of the game and savoring the underlying, invisible mechanics of play. I mapped out the ways that my "lunge" could connect together disparate parts of a battlefield. I experimented with different chained attacks, and mused over the weird millisecond latencies of the button combos. I was no longer thinking about – or even noticing – the blood and guts or the razor-sharp adamantium claws. The game became pure physics and algorithms: Vectors, speed and collision detection. The gore had become mostly irrelevant.

But this leads us to the second, and even bigger, question: If the violence in most action games isn't crucial to making them enjoyable, then why are so many action games so violent?

I posed that to Przybylski and his collaborator Richard Ryan, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Rochester. Both are gamers, and they suspect that game developers are stuck in the "Hollywood model": Designers simply mimic the games of last year.

"When they look at a successful title from the past, they say 'Let's do that again, but turn it up,'" says Ryan. So the endless cycle of games based on brooding, bullet-spraying antiheroes goes on and on.

I think it's also an artifact of marketing. The quickest way to get attention for a game is by touting its limb-specific kill points and "destructible environments," particularly when the audience for action games is mostly young men. The violence is an attempt to pierce through the overcrowded videogame marketplace; it's designed to get young men to simply notice the damn game in the first place, even though everyone involved – the designer, the gamer, the mildly stoned employee at the game store cash register – knows the title will sink or swim not based on the quality of its violence but on the quality of its play.

Are action gamers tiring of this cycle of gore? Sometimes I think so. We've played too many games in which it's obvious that the designers spent more time crafting elaborately fractal explosions and multiply-fanged insectoid enemies than making sure their games are actually, y'know, fun.

Maybe this dismal tradeoff is behind the boom in retro shoot-'em-up games like Geometry Wars and its copycats. Gamers dig conflict that's intense but abstract, because it forces the designers to focus on playability.

Entertainment, in whatever form, is the real red meat that gamers crave. The dish need not be served bloody.

\—

Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to Wired and New York magazines. Look for more of Clive's observations on his blog, collision detection.